Develop and manufacture a complete phone for $100,000?
Easy, if you're already a phone manufacturer. Just take one of your existing phones that has wireless charging and put it in a case that covers the USB and headphone jacks.
Actually, the Javascript thing makes sense to me. Java is a complete, comprehensive ecosystem with legacy of over-engineering that it has taken years to extricate itself from. Javascript is just a language (which happens to have pretty good functional programming facilities).
He *had* cryptocurrency valued at 137 million. Which means he could have grand old time ordering stuff you can buy with cryptocurrency. But as soon as he tries to convert that asset into something substantial like a house, a boat, or a car he'll be leaving traces.
Hiding liquid assets is not a new thing. And it'd be really easy to escape the law *if you never tried to use those assets for anything but hiding*. Cryptocurrency is surely an advance from the point of view of money laundering, but it's not a panacea.
I don't include Internet arguments in this, because people (a) don't know what they're talking about and (b) aren't who they say and (c) often don't actually believe what they say. I'm talking about meatspace where everyone knows each other and have direct knowledge of the question at hand. If everyone disagrees with you, you ought to consider very seriously that you're the one who's wrong. Of course because of groupthink, you may be right.
Confucius's students came to him one day and told him that one of his rival sages claimed to think three times before making any important decision. The master replied, "Twice is enough."
Over the centuries there have been many interpretations of the cryptic remark, but this is the one I subscribe to: if you're barking up the wrong tree, barking harder and longer won't scare the varmint out of the branches. A thoughtful person, when he takes a second look at a question, opens up entire new avenues to explore. A stubborn person just chases his own tail.
I'll do one better: A man more right than his neighbors is a majority of one.
Which is great, except that it's really, really hard to tell the difference between being right and being stubborn. You can't live your life by slogans, you've got to examine the corner cases.
Really smart people have a special brand of foolishness that comes from getting too used to being more right than the people around them. Literally the smartest person I know (of many, many smart people) once had an affair with a married man who she was *certain* was going to leave his wife. You don't have to be smart to fall into that trap, but the different wrinkle is that if you argued with her, *she'd win*, even though it was perfectly obvious she was wrong.
It turned out, by the way, that we were *both* wrong. He did leave his wife, but for another man, which *nobody* was expecting. It goes to show you that your belief is only as good as the information you have. That's why when other people disagree with you, you should listen. They may know, purely by chance, things you don't.
... is like a dog walking on its hind legs. You can train him to do it, but it will never come naturally.
People are social animals; prisoners who are put in solitary confinement for extended periods come out with serious psychological disturbances, even if you do nothing more inhumane than make them sit by themselves for months. In a less extreme version of this, it will always feel uncomfortable to hold an opinion without supporters, even if you know you're right. On the flip side it's all too easy to go along with apparently popular ideas you disagree with. Eventually you'll believe those ideas.
Don't get me wrong. Groupthink is mankind's killer evolutionary advantage. If you disagree with *everyone* around you, chances are you're wrong, although of course that varies depending on you and the people around you. But social media is unlike anything humans have ever experienced before. If you designed an operant conditioning experiment with the aim of producing group think on an unprecedentedly vast, society-wide scale, social media is exactly what you'd end up with.
It's like sugar. Favoring sweet foods is good for you if you're a member of a small band of hunter-gatherers. A sweet tooth is not so good for you if you live in a society that boasts a sugar industry. A bias toward consensus is good for you if you're human living in a small group. It's bad for you if you live in a society with a groupthink industry.
It's important to add this qualification: multiple *independent* sources of information. It's a well-known tactic for propaganda to use multiple mouthpieces. When you see a bunch of people taking *exactly the same position* (often in the same words) it's really just one source of information.
This is why you don't pay too much attention to a hot new paper unless you're a scientist working in the field. Most dramatic new findings don't hold up.
Actually, Wikipedia gives a nice definition of what "Attention Economy" is:
Attention economics is an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity, and applies economic theory to solve various information management problems.... As content has grown increasingly abundant and immediately available, attention becomes the limiting factor in the consumption of information.
All this seems eminently reasonable and well-supportable to me. As to what advertising executives and "content providers" mean when they use the term "attention economy", well they might not mean anything in particular. Such people often use words for how they feel rather than what they denote.
The normal stoichiometric equation for hydrocarbon combustion is:
CxHy + (x + y/4)O2 --> xCO2 + (y/2)H20.
As you see, you get a significant energy contribution by oxidizing the hydrogen. Graphite can be made to burn, but only with considerable preheating; it does not burn energetically.
Well, if it takes *less* energy to do this than it does to burn the coal, I've got a perpetual motion machine design I've got to get working on.
Even assuming that this is a relatively energy efficient process (i.e., that it doesn't use too much more energy than burning the coal released), doing this on a geoengineering scale is going to be much more costly than saving the equivalent carbon emission through conservation and efficiency. You'd need several thousand nuclear power plants to offset the emissions from coal fired plants, and if you did that you might as well just *replace* them.
China may too big to take on, but the Chinese regime is not. If that were not true, then the regime would not be developing systems like this.
I actually don't think the *intent* is to develop some kind of tyranny, although that may be the effect. The fear of political instability and social unrest runs deep. They are trying to create what in their mind is a better society, one that is safer and more orderly. People behave differently when they know they are being watched -- like drivers entering an area where they know there's a speed trap. When the whole highway becomes a speed trap, soon people will adapt by *internalizing* the speed limits.
Eventually, the *impulse* to behave in socially or politically disruptive ways will disappear.
There's been a shift. When I was young, people normally stayed at jobs for ten or more years; it wasn't unusual for people to get out of school, get a job, and work at the same place until retirement. Relationships lasted beyond retirement with people taking company pensions (now largely raided to prop up executive compensation).
The thing is, that's not *agile*. Companies hire and let go workers as needed; there's no sense that there's loyalty owed either way. The people working for you are like strangers you give the keys to your house to. The median duration of employment for someone 25-34 is about three years.
EFTE has been used on a number of notable buildings without problem, but up until the Grenfell Towers disaster in 2017 you could have said the same about Polyisocyanurate (PIR). You can do an impressive fire resistance demonstration with a block of PIR and a plumber's torch, but it's still possible to design an installation where it presents a hazard because it *can* be made to burn, releasing cyanide.
I suspect there isn't much concern about exposing EFTE to something like a candle flame; it just won't catch. But if you're putting a substance which *can* burn, even if very reluctantly, into what can in effect be a plenum space, you need to a little more engineering than a simple small-scale burn test.
Why limit our scope to the climate history of the Earth? I'm sure there are older planets in the galaxy with hotter atmospheres. Or compare it to stellar atmospheres for that matter?
In the context of the history of industrial fossil fuel use, 150 years is significant.
It's actually surprisingly useful to have a basic foundation in things like ontology, just to realize how futile the overblown goals of many database projects are.
Ultimately, if you can support the processes and decisions a customer needs supported in the immediate and near future, you're doing well.
Whenever you ear a report of a hot or cold spell, I recommend visiting University of Maine's Climate Reanalyzer site to look at the temperature anomaly maps. This gives you a far better picture of what's going on globally than local reports do.
For example in this winter's bitter cold spell in North America, you would have seen extremely high temperatures in places like Svalbard Norway. This shows that the cold temperatures in the US midwest weren't the *globe* being colder, they were in fact the consequence of the incursion warm air from the temperate latitudes into the Arctic. Since temperatures mix very slowly on a global scale, the cold Arctic air was displaced southward into central North America. When those cold temperatures "disappeared" a few days later, to be replaced with record warm temperatures, they actually just moved to a different place (e.g. the North Atlantic).
Of course this is still weather, but it's weather compared to a long term climate *baseline* -- 1979-2000. If you make a habit of visiting this data site you'll get used to seeing the globe mostly *orange*, meaning hot compared to the baseline. Eight of the past ten years are among the ten hottest years in the instrumental record. Nine of the last ten were among the hottest when they happened. To see an extensively *blue* (cool) map, you'll have to wait for the next major La Nina event, although in all probability that will still be hotter than baseline most of the time.
Slashdot Mirror
Develop and manufacture a complete phone for $100,000?
Easy, if you're already a phone manufacturer. Just take one of your existing phones that has wireless charging and put it in a case that covers the USB and headphone jacks.
Actually, the Javascript thing makes sense to me. Java is a complete, comprehensive ecosystem with legacy of over-engineering that it has taken years to extricate itself from. Javascript is just a language (which happens to have pretty good functional programming facilities).
The write once/ run anywhere issue mainly falls short for desktop apps; if you write those, I'd probably stay away from Java widget toolkits.
I know of no new development done on java applications or anyone in my company doing anything with java
Well if you don't know about it, it must not exist.
He *had* cryptocurrency valued at 137 million. Which means he could have grand old time ordering stuff you can buy with cryptocurrency. But as soon as he tries to convert that asset into something substantial like a house, a boat, or a car he'll be leaving traces.
Hiding liquid assets is not a new thing. And it'd be really easy to escape the law *if you never tried to use those assets for anything but hiding*. Cryptocurrency is surely an advance from the point of view of money laundering, but it's not a panacea.
I don't include Internet arguments in this, because people (a) don't know what they're talking about and (b) aren't who they say and (c) often don't actually believe what they say. I'm talking about meatspace where everyone knows each other and have direct knowledge of the question at hand. If everyone disagrees with you, you ought to consider very seriously that you're the one who's wrong. Of course because of groupthink, you may be right.
Confucius's students came to him one day and told him that one of his rival sages claimed to think three times before making any important decision. The master replied, "Twice is enough."
Over the centuries there have been many interpretations of the cryptic remark, but this is the one I subscribe to: if you're barking up the wrong tree, barking harder and longer won't scare the varmint out of the branches. A thoughtful person, when he takes a second look at a question, opens up entire new avenues to explore. A stubborn person just chases his own tail.
I'll do one better: A man more right than his neighbors is a majority of one.
Which is great, except that it's really, really hard to tell the difference between being right and being stubborn. You can't live your life by slogans, you've got to examine the corner cases.
Really smart people have a special brand of foolishness that comes from getting too used to being more right than the people around them. Literally the smartest person I know (of many, many smart people) once had an affair with a married man who she was *certain* was going to leave his wife. You don't have to be smart to fall into that trap, but the different wrinkle is that if you argued with her, *she'd win*, even though it was perfectly obvious she was wrong.
It turned out, by the way, that we were *both* wrong. He did leave his wife, but for another man, which *nobody* was expecting. It goes to show you that your belief is only as good as the information you have. That's why when other people disagree with you, you should listen. They may know, purely by chance, things you don't.
... is like a dog walking on its hind legs. You can train him to do it, but it will never come naturally.
People are social animals; prisoners who are put in solitary confinement for extended periods come out with serious psychological disturbances, even if you do nothing more inhumane than make them sit by themselves for months. In a less extreme version of this, it will always feel uncomfortable to hold an opinion without supporters, even if you know you're right. On the flip side it's all too easy to go along with apparently popular ideas you disagree with. Eventually you'll believe those ideas.
Don't get me wrong. Groupthink is mankind's killer evolutionary advantage. If you disagree with *everyone* around you, chances are you're wrong, although of course that varies depending on you and the people around you. But social media is unlike anything humans have ever experienced before. If you designed an operant conditioning experiment with the aim of producing group think on an unprecedentedly vast, society-wide scale, social media is exactly what you'd end up with.
It's like sugar. Favoring sweet foods is good for you if you're a member of a small band of hunter-gatherers. A sweet tooth is not so good for you if you live in a society that boasts a sugar industry. A bias toward consensus is good for you if you're human living in a small group. It's bad for you if you live in a society with a groupthink industry.
It's important to add this qualification: multiple *independent* sources of information. It's a well-known tactic for propaganda to use multiple mouthpieces. When you see a bunch of people taking *exactly the same position* (often in the same words) it's really just one source of information.
This is why you don't pay too much attention to a hot new paper unless you're a scientist working in the field. Most dramatic new findings don't hold up.
The hardest thing in business, and (equivalently) one that costs a lot of money: obtaining customers.
Once you have the customer relationship you can buy or hire the expertise needed to exploit it different ways.
I am Chinese American, but I have never been. I cancelled my trip there in 1989, for obvious reasons.
Of course the Chinese people think highly of the their government. Based on what they know, why wouldn't they?
Actually, Wikipedia gives a nice definition of what "Attention Economy" is:
Attention economics is an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity, and applies economic theory to solve various information management problems. ...
As content has grown increasingly abundant and immediately available, attention becomes the limiting factor in the consumption of information.
All this seems eminently reasonable and well-supportable to me. As to what advertising executives and "content providers" mean when they use the term "attention economy", well they might not mean anything in particular. Such people often use words for how they feel rather than what they denote.
Actually, they can challenge Netflix. Just like I can challenge Hafthor Bjornson to a deadlift competition.
Sometimes winning is not a realistic proposition. It doesn't necessarily mean it isn't worth competing.
The normal stoichiometric equation for hydrocarbon combustion is:
CxHy + (x + y/4)O2 --> xCO2 + (y/2)H20.
As you see, you get a significant energy contribution by oxidizing the hydrogen. Graphite can be made to burn, but only with considerable preheating; it does not burn energetically.
Well, if it takes *less* energy to do this than it does to burn the coal, I've got a perpetual motion machine design I've got to get working on.
Even assuming that this is a relatively energy efficient process (i.e., that it doesn't use too much more energy than burning the coal released), doing this on a geoengineering scale is going to be much more costly than saving the equivalent carbon emission through conservation and efficiency. You'd need several thousand nuclear power plants to offset the emissions from coal fired plants, and if you did that you might as well just *replace* them.
China may too big to take on, but the Chinese regime is not. If that were not true, then the regime would not be developing systems like this.
I actually don't think the *intent* is to develop some kind of tyranny, although that may be the effect. The fear of political instability and social unrest runs deep. They are trying to create what in their mind is a better society, one that is safer and more orderly. People behave differently when they know they are being watched -- like drivers entering an area where they know there's a speed trap. When the whole highway becomes a speed trap, soon people will adapt by *internalizing* the speed limits.
Eventually, the *impulse* to behave in socially or politically disruptive ways will disappear.
There's been a shift. When I was young, people normally stayed at jobs for ten or more years; it wasn't unusual for people to get out of school, get a job, and work at the same place until retirement. Relationships lasted beyond retirement with people taking company pensions (now largely raided to prop up executive compensation).
The thing is, that's not *agile*. Companies hire and let go workers as needed; there's no sense that there's loyalty owed either way. The people working for you are like strangers you give the keys to your house to. The median duration of employment for someone 25-34 is about three years.
EFTE has been used on a number of notable buildings without problem, but up until the Grenfell Towers disaster in 2017 you could have said the same about Polyisocyanurate (PIR). You can do an impressive fire resistance demonstration with a block of PIR and a plumber's torch, but it's still possible to design an installation where it presents a hazard because it *can* be made to burn, releasing cyanide.
I suspect there isn't much concern about exposing EFTE to something like a candle flame; it just won't catch. But if you're putting a substance which *can* burn, even if very reluctantly, into what can in effect be a plenum space, you need to a little more engineering than a simple small-scale burn test.
Why limit our scope to the climate history of the Earth? I'm sure there are older planets in the galaxy with hotter atmospheres. Or compare it to stellar atmospheres for that matter?
In the context of the history of industrial fossil fuel use, 150 years is significant.
It's actually surprisingly useful to have a basic foundation in things like ontology, just to realize how futile the overblown goals of many database projects are.
Ultimately, if you can support the processes and decisions a customer needs supported in the immediate and near future, you're doing well.
Well then, it's not much of a point, if what he thinks that means there is no evidence New Zealand has warmed.
Because New Zealand has records going back hundreds of years, eh?
I'm not sure what your point is. Historical meteorological records for New Zealand go back almost 150 years.
Whenever you ear a report of a hot or cold spell, I recommend visiting University of Maine's Climate Reanalyzer site to look at the temperature anomaly maps. This gives you a far better picture of what's going on globally than local reports do.
For example in this winter's bitter cold spell in North America, you would have seen extremely high temperatures in places like Svalbard Norway. This shows that the cold temperatures in the US midwest weren't the *globe* being colder, they were in fact the consequence of the incursion warm air from the temperate latitudes into the Arctic. Since temperatures mix very slowly on a global scale, the cold Arctic air was displaced southward into central North America. When those cold temperatures "disappeared" a few days later, to be replaced with record warm temperatures, they actually just moved to a different place (e.g. the North Atlantic).
Of course this is still weather, but it's weather compared to a long term climate *baseline* -- 1979-2000. If you make a habit of visiting this data site you'll get used to seeing the globe mostly *orange*, meaning hot compared to the baseline. Eight of the past ten years are among the ten hottest years in the instrumental record. Nine of the last ten were among the hottest when they happened. To see an extensively *blue* (cool) map, you'll have to wait for the next major La Nina event, although in all probability that will still be hotter than baseline most of the time.